How common is the term "boondoggle"? And what is its origin?

If the Boy Scout etymology is true, I suspect that this word may ultimately derive from toggle:

boon (benefit, good) + toggle ("pin passed through the eye of a rope, strap, or bolt to hold it in place")

And it would look something like those seen in this image from Pinterest:

This is the sort of crafts project undertaken by scouts in which they created some marginally useful object, thereby learning skills and patience. Adults who did "real" work would have contempt for such endeavors, however, if they were undertaken by other adults. Hence the pejorative context during the New Deal.

I can tell you from my own experience that in the 1980s my colleagues at the advertising agency I worked for referred to any project that got one "out on production" (i.e., to New York or L.A. where most of the production work was performed by hired talent) as a boondoggle. The implication here was that it was a free vacation with varying amounts of responsibility. Nobody had to explain the term then, and it was readily understood by anyone who encountered it.

I found 143 cases of boondoggle in the COCA corpus. Since that corpus consists of 450 million words, 143 is a relatively low occurrence. I would say that the word is indeed uncommon. For the sake of comparison I will mention that brouhaha had 211 hits and shenanigans 420.

A quick look at the results confirms that the overwhelming majority is in a political context but there are a very few that might (I can't tell from the COCA results) not be directly related to politics:

? Can they attach O.J. Simpsons right to publicity, or is this just another boondoggle a lawyer put in Fred Goldmans head? RANDY-ZELIN-DEFEN: Its not going to work

Even such examples as those, however, have a whiff of politics to them. This is confirmed when looking at the word's occurrences by section:

As you can see in the image above, the word is most often used by newspapers. Also note that a lot of the spoken word sources of COCA are from TV shows, in the analytical results, one can see that the word appears in the transcripts of such political shows as CNN Event or PBS Newshour, once more confirming its political bent.

In conclusion, the word seems to be well enough known, if uncommon and is indeed far more often used in the context of politics.

I hear it a lot, so I'd say in the USA at least it's a fairly common word.

The context is usually either corporate or political.

In a corporate setting, this usually refers to some corporate event that seems (to the speaker) to be a waste of the company's money for participants' benefit (eg: stopping work for some kind of "leadership training" or "team building exercise", sending employees to a conference at a ski resort or tropical resort).

In a political setting it's similar. It's usually used in one of two ways. The first is to describe a taxpayer-funded trip (often termed a "fact-finding mission") of dubious value. I also hear it a lot to describe a government program that the speaker feels is a big waste of money.

World Wide Words defines boondoggle as:

• the typically North American term for an unnecessary or wasteful project that is often applied in two specific ways:

  • to describe work of little or no value done merely to appear busy,
  • in reference to a government-funded project with no purpose other than political patronage. It can also be used for an unnecessary journey by a government official at public expense.

As for its origin it says:

• Part of its oddity lies in its sudden emergence into public view in an article in the New York Times on 4 April 1935. This had the headline “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play ... Boon Doggles Made”. The “boon doggles” of the headline turn out to be small items of leather, rope and canvas, which were being crafted by the jobless during the Great Depression as a form of make-work. The article quoted a person who taught the unemployed to create them that the word was “simply a term applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today”. He suggested that boondoggles had been small items of leatherwork which were made by cowboys on idle days as decorations for their saddles.

Regarding its early usage and further evidence of its origin:

• The word instantly became famous. It seems that Americans had been feeling the lack of a good word to describe unnecessary, wasteful, or fraudulent projects and leapt upon it with delight. It had actually been around for some years, though attracting little notice. The first appearance of the word currently known is this, reporting the visit of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) to the World Boy Scouts Jamboree at Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool:*

  • The Prince also wore around his scout hat a “boondoggle,” which is a bright leather braided lanyard worn much in the manner of the hat cord used by the United States Army. (New York Herald Tribune, 3 Aug 1929.)

• A more expansive mention appeared in a British publication later in the month:

  • The chief scout has recently been presented by the University of Liverpool with a Degree, and by the scouts of America with a boondoggle. Of the two, I think I should prefer the boondoggle. Great as is the honour conferred by the Seat of Learning, there is a homely flavour about the other gift which touches the heart even more. “Boondoggle.” It is a word to conjure with, to roll around the tongue; an expressive word to set the fancy moving in strange and comforting channels; and it rhymes with “goggle,” “boggle,” and “woggle,” three of the most lighthearted words in the English language. (Punch, 14 Aug. 1929)

• The Daily Messenger of Canandaigua, New York, explained the background to this puzzling item on 20 August 1931:

  • The boondoggle, which leaped literally into fame overnight when it was introduced by Rochester Boy Scouts at the jamboree in England, is a braided lanyard on which various things such as whistles can be hung. So fascinating do the boys find it, that they have spent practically all their spare time on the work.

• This is confirmed by a report of a scout camp the following year, which also suggests a broader meaning for the word as a type of leatherwork:

  • Several thousand yards of boondoggle material have also been stocked in the craftshop to meet the demand of scouts for making lanyards, whistles, cards, bells, hatbands, neckerchief slides, a craft which last year consumed over 3000 yards of imitation leather braid. (Oakland Tribune, 29 May 1932.)

• On 6 April 1935, two days after the New York Times article appeared, a contrary view about the origin of the word was published in a syndicated snippet in the Nevada State Journal:

  • “The word ‘boondoggle’ was coined out of the blue sky by Robert H. Link, eagle scout,” wrote Hastings. “It has absolutely no significance except that it has come to mean a good-looking addition to the uniform.”

According to this final source, the more reliable origin is the scouting context, rather than the Cowboys of the pioneer days:

• Mr Link, later a scoutmaster, was also said to have been its originator in an item in a magazine called Word Study later the same year. He is now often quoted in reference works as its inventor. As all the early appearances of boondoggle — none before 1929 — are in connection with Scouts’ lanyards, it is indeed likely that it was created in that milieu. The stories about cowboys and pioneer days have nothing going for them apart from the guesses of one person reported in the 1935 New York Times article. It was that article that converted boondoggle from a word existing quietly in its own small world to one of public importance and continuing usefulness.

(from world wide words)

In general, Josh61’s answer provides very strong factual background on the emergence of boondoggle as a term that is now used to characterize wasteful projects or expenditures or unproductive employment (often in connection with the government). However, I wanted to add a few references that fill out the picture of usage in 1935 and before.

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A neckerchief well boondoggled

With regard to the possible Boy Scout origin of the term, one historian of the Boy Scouts asserts that “Boon Doggle” originally referred not to a lanyard but to a ring for holding a scout’s neckerchief in place. From Susan Cohen, The Scouts (2012) [combined snippets]:

Around this time, the problem of creased neckerchiefs or scarves, was resolved with the creation of the 'woggle' by Bill Shankley, an eighteen-year-old campsite employee at Gilwell Park, in the 1920s. The British ring, through which the scarf was threaded, was a version of the American ‘Boon Doggle’, and was made of fine leather strips plaited in a knot. It was officially approved for general use by the committee of the Scout Movement Council in July 1923.

If the “woggle” was indeed approved under that name for general use by the [British] Scout Movement Council in July 1923, that suggests that the American equivalent “Boon Doggle” may have been known as such even earlier.

Another citation of a very early source occurs in Geoge Stimpson, A Book About American Politics (1952) [combined snippets]:

In 1935 a movie actor named Guy Kib[b]ee thought the people in the Ozarks called gadgets made of discarded materials boondoggles because Daniel Boone whiled away idle hours whittling out toys for his dog to play with. Robert H. Link, a former Boy Scout of Rochester, New York, said in the same year that he had nicknamed his son “Boondoggle” when he was born in 1926. Link thought his use of the word was responsible for its adoption by the Boy Scouts during the Jamboree in England in 1929. An unidentified writer in the March, 1930, issue of Scouting said: "Boon-doggles are like old-type lanyards. They are made of plaited leather. Scouts have been making them for years for uniform ornaments all over the world."

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Boondoggling becomes political

The original report of the New York City Aldermanic Committee, “In the Matter of the Investigation of the Administration of Unemployment Relief in the City of New York” is dated July 8, 1935, although the witnesses called by the committee testified between October 16, 1934, and March 2, 1935. Evidently portions of the testimony reached the press well before the report's July 8, 1935, publication date, since the watershed New York Times article based on its findings appeared (as Josh61 notes) on April 4, 1935. In any event, boondoggling came up in a single brief instance in the report:

Boondoggling: Mr. Marshall, of Massachusetts

Another training specialist who testified was Robert Marshall, of Springfield, Massachusetts. He is the gentleman who gave this investigation, and the world, boondoggling, a subject taught in his branch of the recreational school. There are 150 relief workers who come to this branch of the school to be taught various craft activities.

In a letter to Forum magazine (July 1936) [combined snippets] in response to an article by H.G. Leach titled “In Praise of Boon-Doggling,” Joseph E. Kinsley, Vice-Chairman of the Aldermanic Committee for the Investigation of Relief in New York City said this:

I have just read the editorial foreword in the June issue [of Forum] with great interest.

I must however, register an emphatic protest against the utter misconception of the problem which this foreword discloses. “Boon-doggling” is not an epithet invented by the Aldermanic Committee investigating relief, its counsel, nor the newspapers. It is a word used by the witness, in charge of this division of relief activities, who claimed that it was an old Western term applied to practical gadgets. This definition was discarded even by those most familiar with the history of the Western pioneers. It developed that it was a young Boy Scout’s word used to describe articles made by himself. “Boon-doggling” was thereafter popularly applied to the varied wasteful activities which the investigation disclosed. We make no attack on "boon-doggling" in its narrow sense, if "boon-doggling" is necessary to provide work for those on the relief rolls, but we do attack it as a symbol of what a wasteful social-service cult has foisted on these unfortunate people…

Outside the world of scouting, however, the term boondoggle appears to have been virtually unknown prior to the New York Times article on the Aldermanic Committee findings, as appears from the many published comments in 1935 and 1936 regarding the novelty of the term, which in any case very quickly acquired its sense of (first) a nonessential and (soon afterward) a wasteful undertaking.

For example, from Carter Anderson, How to Locate Educational Information and Data: A Text and Reference Book (1935):

28. Where can I find the meaning and proper use of a very recently introduced word like "gadget" or "boon-doggle"?

From Samuel Smith, The Command of Words (1935) [snippet]:

Again, the Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary is immensely hospitable to new words and coinages. We may expect to see in the next edition such neologisms as 'boon-doggles,' 'gertrudesteining,' and 'Ogden-Nashery.' The pages of this

“The Boggle Industry,” in Life magazine (1936) [combined snippets] not only notes the non–Boy Scout meaning of the term but suggests that a short-lived short form of boondoggle (boggle) was in use by 1936:

It isn’t in the dictionaries yet, but future editions will doubtless carry such entry as; “Boondoggle, v. to putter or dilly-dally. Specifically to spend time and money on apparently useless tasks, usually at public expense. Such as: painting funny faces on mothballs.” And that would stand as a reasonably accurate definition of boon-doggling as it is today.

Billions must be spent putting people to work, but it must be work that won't interfere with private industry. The result is a fantastic array of rather odd budget items—$14,762 for a lily pond at Placerville, Cal., $1300 for "advisers'' in the Stockton public library, $2712 for a tree census in Harrisburg, Penn.—and so on.

There are lots of boon-doggles—or boggles, for short—and WPA turns out brand new ones every day.

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One man’s boondoggle is another man’s scoubidou

As a final comment on the term, I note this interesting entry for boondoggle from Paul Dickson, Words From the White House: Words and Phrases Coined or Popularized by America’s Presidents (2013):

BOONDOGGLE. A word that has come to mean work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value. The word was not coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt but it was made famous by him on January 18, 1936, when he made some informal extemporaneous remarks to the New Jersey State Emergency Council in reference to the programs of the New Deal. “There is a grand word that is going around, ‘boondoggle.’ It is a pretty good word. If we can 'boondoggle' ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for many years to come.”

The word boondoggle isn’t enshrined in the hearts of the American people in quite the grateful way that Roosevelt had hoped. But as Eugene Reybold, Chief of Engineers of the U.S. War Department, wrote in “America’s Waterways in the War Effort,” Marine News (1942) [combined snippets], yesterday’s boondoggle can be today’s vital infrastructure upgrade:

I have described how today—in contrast to 1917—we have this fine system of waterways actually operating, actually in being. How did that come about?

Well, it didn't just happen. It was the result of a lot of careful planning, a lot of hard work, and a tremendous amount of persevering. And in the record of that work and that perseverance, the name of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress figures often and prominently. While thinking about what I could say to you here today, I leafed through some of the old reports of previous meetings of this Congress. They tell the story. Many a project endorsed in your resolutions is now playing an important part in the war. Many a project which short-sighted critics dubbed as 'pork barrel' or 'boondoggle' is now carrying the steel from which tanks and other armaments are being made. The voices of those critics are now silent. And the Nation gives thanks to those far-sighted critics who fought for projects productive of such invaluable service.

It might be worth mentioning "boon"

OED

Etymology: < Old Norse bón, the etymological correspondent of Old English bén , Middle English bene n., prayer. Through such phrases as ‘ask a boon’, ‘have one's boon’, ‘grant a boon’, taken without analysis, the sense easily passed, by insensible transitions, from ‘prayer’, to ‘favour asked’, ‘favour conferred’, ‘free gift,’ ‘good thing received’.

5. A gift considered with reference to its value to the receiver; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something that one has no claim to, or that might have been absent. (The usual current sense.)

1767 T. Hutchinson Hist. Province Massachusets-Bay, 1691–1750 i The charter of Massachusets was not so great a boon.

1876 J. R. Green Short Hist. Eng. People (1882) iii. §3. 124 The boon of free and unbought justice was a boon for all.